The 17inch models will allow the larger laptop drives (12.5mm) but they only extend to 1tb these days. You could alway perform a Time machine backup and restore or just take a snapshot of the drive with Super Duper or any cloning program to avoid having to reinstall everything.

You can choose any 2.5 inch hard drive you would like, however, there are size restrictions. I believe the 15 inch macbook pro's though can only use 9.5mm height drives and not the bigger 12.5mm drives. So even though there are 1 tb 2.5 inch drives out there, they are all 12.5mm height and will not fit the macbook pro.

The largest 2.5inch 5400rpm 9.5mm height drive currently on the market is 750gb.